First week using blender

We were tasked with a blender self-study crash course to quickly teach us the basics of blender. Now that I have used blender I can say with confidence that I hate modelling and I can't wait for this part of the unit to be over.

I first watched the recommended blender 2.8 introduction videos and then watched and completed a barrel tutorial. The tutorial is found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HggtU6Nzlao and my model is provided as an attachment and heres what my model looked like at the end.

I faced a couple problems when following the tutorial. First off, my uv map didn't turn out mostly dark blue and looks like this:

But I mean it's blue so that's good enough for me and I don't know how to fix it.

The next problem I encountered was that I couldn't texture the underside of the barrel (the lid textured fine). There seemed to be a weird "barrier" stopping any texturing from happening on around half the bottom and I didn't know how to fix that (uv map issue?).
My uv map also didn't come apart when I split the uv map into 4 quarters for some reason so I fixed that by just recreating the uv map.
I hate uv maps.

The second task for our self-study was modelling a tourist attraction in Tasmania. I chose the memorial at Anzac Park.

(Oops, ignore my finger)
And the model looks like this:

I tried to add the bricks, but they always ended up diagonal because of the inset (?) and after remaking the model a bunch of times because I have no idea what I'm doing I just gave up. Maybe when/if we learn more about texturing ill be able to add the extra details missing.

Looking at the schedule it seems like I only have to use blender for one more week and then I never have to touch it again which I have to thank God for (or probably Ian tbh).

Not sure how to include attachments so I uploaded them to OneDrive and allowed anyone from utas to view them; hopefully they can be downloaded. In the save folder there is blend and blend1 files not sure what the difference is though so here's both :).

barrel.blend
barrel.blend1
monument.blend
monument.blend1